Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T16:54:13.177Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Early perception–late comprehension of grammar? The case of verbal -s: a response to de Villiers & Johnson (2007)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2008

MELANIE SODERSTROM
MELANIE SODERSTROM*
Affiliation:
Brown University
*
Address for correspondence: Melanie Soderstrom, Department of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, Brown University Box 1978, 190 Thayer St., Providence, RI 02912. Email: melsod@brown.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal -s until five–six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal -s as young as 1; 4. These apparently conflicting findings can be reconciled by differentiating between early perceptual grammatical knowledge and later semantic comprehension.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , August 2008 , pp. 671 - 676
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Thanks to Dr Katherine S. White and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this manuscript.

References

REFERENCES

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cairns, H., Schlisselberg, G., Waltzman, D. & McDaniel, D. (2006). Development of a metalinguistic skill: judging the grammaticality of sentences. Communication Disorders Quarterly 27, 213–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J. G. & Johnson, V. E. (2007). The information in third-person /s/: acquisition across dialects of American English. Journal of Child Language 34, 133–58.Google Scholar
Gertner, Y., Fisher, C. & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science 17(8), 684–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gomez, R. & Gerken, L. (1999). Artificial grammar learning by one-year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge. Cognition 70, 109–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R. M. (1996). The origins of grammar: evidence from early language comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kouider, S., Halberda, J., Wood, J. & Carey, S. (2006). Acquisition of English number marking: the singular–plural distinction. Language Learning and Development 2(1), 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, V. E., de Villiers, J. G. & Seymour, H. N. (2005). Agreement without understanding? The case of third person singular /s/. First Language 25(3), 317–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mintz, T. H. (2006). Finding the verbs: distributional cues to categories available to young learners. In Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R. M. (eds) Action meets word: how children learn verbs, 31–63. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naigles, L. (2002). Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language. Cognition 86, 157–99.Google Scholar
Saffran, J., Aslin, R. & Newport, E. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274, 1926–8.Google Scholar
Santelmann, L. & Jusczyk, P. W. (1998). Sensitivity to discontinuous dependencies in language learners: evidence for limitations in processing space. Cognition 69, 105–34.Google Scholar
Shady, M. (1996). Infants' sensitivity to function morphemes. Unpublished dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M. (2002). The acquisition of inflection morphology in early perceptual knowledge of syntax. Unpublished dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M., Wexler, K. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2002). English-learning toddlers' sensitivity to agreement morphology in receptive grammar. In Skarabela, B., Fish, S. & Do, A. H.-J. (eds) Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, vol. 2, 643–52. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M., White, K. S., Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. L. (2007). Receptive grammatical knowledge of familiar content words and inflection in 16-month-olds. Infancy 12, 1–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74, 209–53.Google Scholar